Each year in the U.S. there are hundreds of thousands of hospital-acquired infections caused by poor hand hygiene. Current electronic hand hygiene monitoring systems suffer from low accuracy. For example, conventional systems fail to correctly determine when a staff member was required to sanitize their hands, and may also fail to correctly determine when a staff member sanitizes their hands. Wireless sensor networks have been deployed to assist in making these determinations. One of the primary problems with conventional systems is that the received signal strength (RSS) in wireless sensor networks present significant challenges for position tracking in indoor environments.
For example, current systems use singular approaches to determining when a staff member was required to sanitize their hands. Various existing systems have settled on a specific wavelength of radio waves for communication and specific methods for using these communication characteristics to determine the location of medical staff. However, each has specific drawbacks leading to significant challenges in producing a highly accurate (e.g., >90%) zone detection system to accurately determine when a user is required to sanitize their hands and accurately monitor hand hygiene compliance.
Various conventional approaches have been implemented to determine whether medical staff are inside of a predetermined zone in an indoor environment. However, distance and position estimation in indoor environments suffer from low accuracy due to multi-path effects, attenuation from walls, equipment, furniture, and the human body, which lead to incorrect estimations about whether medical staff are in the correct zones at the correct times. In the case where a radio frequency (RF) wavelength is selected that requires line of sight such as infrared, low accuracy is often the result due to frequently interrupted line of sight, and signal reflections between the location beacon and the tag.
Accordingly, a need remains for an improved method and system for increasing accuracy of hygiene compliance. Embodiments of the inventive concept address these and other limitations in the prior art.
The foregoing and other features of the inventive concept will become more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.